"...his origins make themselves plain..."

At sixty-three, Ernest Tubb is something like a mirror image of these fans. Although his hair is still dark and he continues to hold himself erect in his turquoise suit, white Stetson, and gleaming brown boots, the once-lean frame has filled out, and the bags under the eyes, wattles under the chin, and slow crinkling smile all give him the look of the plain hard-working men and women who come out to see him. It is almost as if, having cheated fate once when he escaped the bleak West Texas farmland on which he was raised, he has only met it in another guise on down the line, as his origins make themselves plain in the worn weathered features, the honest creased roadmap of his face.

I'm revisiting Lost Highway for the first time in at least twenty years. I first picked up the book specifically for its profiles of blues musicians (Howlin' Wolf, etc.) back when I was really into blues, though I had (and still have) little interest in country music. But Guralnick is such a marvelous writer that I even enjoy his profiles of country musicians immensely.